Ángeles Cereceda

Ángeles Cereceda was born in 1962 in Santander, Spain. After concluding her studies in Arts and Crafts and Advertising she entered J. Torrents LLadó School of Art, where she developed and honed her technical skills for pencil, charcoal and pastel drawing, watercolor, and oil. Before finishing her degree she joined the faculty team and would eventually become the School’s director.

She currently lives and works in Palma de Mallorca (Spain), though exhibitions and portrait commissions keep her traveling wherever she is required to.

About me

Painters are not usually people of many words. However, in our job we are frequently compelled to express in language what is patently plastic, always visceral and intuitive—rather inexplicable. This is specially so for the artist herself, who is lost amidst feelings, letting herself carried away by them, while searching at the same time for the technical solutions that will allow her to convey upon the canvas, as faithfully as possible, what she feels before the model.

When in this situation, there is no use looking for an explanation or a justification regarding how or why one paints one thing and not another. To do that would imply to abandon that mood which is purely emotional in order to focus on the practical, the useful, the explicable, the logical—all that is so remote from the artist’s real task.

I renounced to “explain” my work long time ago. My “how” and my “why” always respond to the whimsical transience of the moment. When I work I strive to discharge upon the painting all the energy I am able to gather, trying to imprint but an impression of the overwhelming sensation that takes hold of me at that very moment. When I’m done, almost always, a feeling of dissatisfaction comes over me. It is precisely that debt what pushes me to confront again the white linen as a fresh, new opportunity to try to get a bit closer to what I long for.

Once a work is finished and exposed to the gaze of others, it leaves that private circle and acquires a life of its own. Everything that happens from that moment onward is beyond the artist’s control. Neither acceptance nor rejection depend on her, and that is when analysis really begins. The result of the work will only be acknowledged if it succeeds in connecting in some way with the beholder. And yet, all this remains alien to the painter’s will.

The pieces I have been working on these last years reach now that very threshold. It is an honour for me to be able to show my work and to “expose” myself once again, after so many exhibitions. I can only hope for that mysterious connection to happen, for that acknowledgement that now depends entirely on the interest of the spectator.

The time has come for analysis, for observation, for understanding and reason, but, above all, for the emotions that may be born in other people’s gazes.